This Flavorful Meat-Free Starbucks Breakfast Sandwich Outshines A Classic Sausage, Egg, And Cheese

Most breakfast sandwiches include some type of meat item, so it can be a bit challenging to find a good vegetarian sandwich without feeling like you have to modify an existing menu item or completely sacrifice flavor. But as it happens, Tasting Table tried every Starbucks breakfast sandwich, and in third place came the vegetarian Egg, Pesto & Mozzarella Sandwich. It performed better than the classic Sausage, Cheddar & Egg, and was beaten only by the Impossible Breakfast Sandwich (another vegetarian option) and the Double-Smoked Bacon, Cheddar & Egg.

The star of the Egg, Pesto & Mozzarella Sandwich is the kale pesto, featuring kale, canola oil, olive oil, basil, garlic, parsley, and lemon juice concentrate. According to our taste tester, the pesto has a surprising freshness to it, with a recognizable flavor of basil. Along with the pesto, the sandwich comes with mozzarella cheese and an egg frittata, the latter of which also received special praise from our tester due to the fact that it nicely balanced out the other components in the sandwich. Before you ask — yes, the eggs in Starbucks breakfast sandwiches are real (although there's more to the story). The frittata, pesto, and cheese are nestled within ciabatta bread, which has extra cheese and onions in the crust, making this $5 breakfast item even more flavorful.

Starbucks-goers generally report high satisfaction with this meat-free breakfast option. "I love this sandwich. It's perfect," wrote one customer on Reddit. "I like it too, it's pretty tasty. Though I generally don't associate pesto with breakfast items," admitted somebody else. The sandwich even got the stamp of approval from the harshest food critics known to man — kids. "Our 1 yo looooves Egg, Pesto & Mozzarella Sandwich," reported a parent. When it comes to pairing this sandwich with a drink, some claim ordering it with matcha is the superior combo, which actually aligns with our advice on Starbucks beverage and breakfast sandwich pairings, where we recommended ordering the pesto sammie with an Iced Non-dairy Salted Caramel Cookie Matcha.

But, for all its praise, the Egg, Pesto & Mozzarella does have one quite interesting fault: It reportedly smells awful. On a Reddit thread discussing the sandwich's smell in particularly colorful language, people have compared its odor to sweat and a locker room, with one person even commenting, "I literally thought I forgot to put on deodorant yesterday when I walked into work and I was so embarrassed the entire day 😭 and then I walked in this morning just for it to be that damn sandwich omfg." The culprit behind the bad smell appears to be the pesto, although most agree that if you can get past the smell, the sandwich still tastes great.